Often, users might have two Telepathy Connection Managers installed for the same protocol, e.g. telepathy-haze and just about any other single-protocol CM, like gabble or butterfly, will result in two CM's offering jabber or MSN support. In this case, we should make it as simple as possible for the user to specify which one to use. Some ideas: - We should avoid bothering the user with the choice of CM unless it is strictly necessary. We should ask to choose a protocol first (with the current protocol list only displaying each protocol once, no matter how many CM's support it). -Iff the user selects a protocol that is offered by more than one CM, we should present them with a choice of CM's. - We should make the choose CM screen simple to use, preselecting a default and explaining to the user that "THe default choice of Connection Manager is usually the best one" so they can just prod OK and carry on, but can still change it if they are a power user, or have problems with the other CM. - We should try and make an intelligent choice of default CM for a protocol: -- A hard coded list of preferred CM's is a possibility, although this would suffer from the problems of going out of date, or not including all CM's ever written. -- Another possibility is to dynamically introspect (if telepathy supports this) what capabilities the CM's support, and defaulting to the one with the most. However the weakness with this is a crappy CM which claims to do everything would take priority over a less featured but more reliable one.
Profile files pretty much fix this.